If you hang around me enough, you'll soon find out that I volunteer heavily with the Scouts (Boy Scouts of America, soon-to-be Scouting America). I am a huge fan of what they do for youth, getting them out into nature, teaching them to use their hands and tools, allowing them to broadly explore all kinds of activities and topics, and generally become well-rounded, self-sufficient people.
As a volunteer with that organization, I have to take a giant pile of training. Youth protection so I can recognize child predators and maintain standards to keep kids safe, position-specific training so I know how my position functions in the group, all kinds of various safety training for taking the youth swimming, boating, hiking, food safety, first aid, bullying, hazardous weather, and many more. There is a lot of stuff to learn, but safe exploration is the name of the game. From
the leader's perspective safe is the operative word. From the scout's it is exploration. It is a great recipe.
One of those things leaders take before going on multi-day trips out into a more wilderness area is called "Wilderness First Aid." Wilderness First Aid goes way beyond washing cuts, Neosporin, and a bandaid. When you are a whole day's hike or more into the forest, 911 isn't coming in a few minutes. They may not be coming for many hours or even days. And that's if you can reach them on your device. Wilderness first aid is what you need to know and how you need to think to handle those situations. It is an intense kind of class.
I know, I know, this is a horse training blog. What does that have to do with horses?
Wilderness first aid is what you do to try and keep the person alive, and try not to make the situation worse. It's how you handle an overwhelming, stressful, and dangerous situation and make it to hike another day. It isn't a hike, nor is it really
medical treatment.
Yet, I see what I consider "wilderness first aid" techniques used and marketed as training for horses all the time. By that I mean, techniques that will get you through a more or less desperate type of situation and allow you to come out on
the other side, but just like first aid doesn't address underlying medical conditions, strengthen and improve function or otherwise really help a person long term. So it is for these so-called "training" techniques. The horse may get in the trailer, but he isn't calm, or relaxed, or comfortable, or otherwise improved. He is simply in the trailer.
Just like all of the classroom training I take to keep the youth safe, plus all of the physical training required to go on a multi-day wilderness backpacking trip, real horse training takes time, focus, consistency, and building up over time. Learning skills,
muscle memory, strength, teamwork, and communication are all done over time. While the very best wilderness first aid practitioners can minimize the additional trauma and ensure surprisingly good outcomes for the patient, they are still just patching you up until someone can take more time to address all aspects of the situation.
All good horse people should have some wilderness first aid style techniques to get through things where training just isn't really possible because things come up. When my young horse went to the clinic to get gelded he wouldn't go in the vet's barn. He simply didn't have the experience to generalize, it was a really bright day + a dark barn, and the vet (a stranger to the horse) was handling him because I had just had my appendix out the day before. So the vet, being an excellent horseman, simply backed him into the barn. That was a great move given the constraints of the situation. My horse was in the barn, untraumatized, the vet was able to keep on schedule, and I didn't rip out my stitches.
Drugs are kind of the ultimate wilderness first aid technique. They help you get through the problem and reduce the amount of trauma and memories of the event that can cause future issues. I had a two-year-old thoroughbred mare with a nasty, painful abscess. She had tracks all over the place in her sole, and the treatment lasted around 6 weeks. To reduce potential problems with the farrier down the road, when the vet came to work on her foot I had her sedate the mare, nerve block the foot, and then she put liocane directly on the sole.
A few other techniques off the top of my head include the one-rein stop, the pully rein, twitches, and lead chains. In my opinion, anything that overly focuses on getting something done *that day* qualifies. Trailer loading is often presented that way, that if the horse doesn't go all the way in the trailer that day, somehow that will mess him up (It won't, but forcing him on and calling it
training might.)
Ultimately, we are always going to need wilderness techniques to manage when things get oval-shaped. Things happen when you do stuff with horses and having techniques to help you and the horse safely get to the other side is important. However, we shouldn't confuse that with actual training.
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